The list of books facing the title page of A Hitch in Time, a new collection of old essays by the late Christopher Hitchens, is a long one, and includes (in necessarily tiny print) volumes about topics ranging from Orwell to Jefferson to atheism to the Elgin Marbles. Nevertheless, Hitchens, who died in December 2011 at the age of 62 after a long and very public struggle with cancer, was always by vocation not an author of books but an essayist, a man whose natural role was to react, quickly and briefly and passionately, to the events of the day. Or to review books. So it is that many of the items in his long list of earlier publications aren’t “real books,” a term I use myself to distinguish my own written-from-scratch volumes from the grab-bags, but are either pamphlets (Karl Marx and the Paris Commune; The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice) or assemblages of essays, the last two of which were the nearly 800-page omnibus Arguably, published just a few months prior to his death, and And Yet…, which followed in 2015. A Hitch in Time: Reflections Ready for Reconsideration, his second posthumous collection, brings together pieces that he contributed to the London Review of Books between 1983 and 2002.

Is it necessary, in 2024, to explain who Christopher Hitchens was? Born and bred in Britain, he was active in far-left student circles at Oxford, started his professional journalistic career at a periodical called International Socialism, and later became a columnist and war correspondent for the left-wing New Statesman. After crossing the pond and settling in Washington, D.C., in 1981 (he became an American citizen in 2007), Hitchens remained a fixture of the left – indeed, he would continue to identify as a Trotskyist for the rest of his life – but, despite that, and notwithstanding his role as a leader of the “New Atheist” movement, which thrived from about 2004 to 2014 (and which gave him his only big bestseller, the 2007 polemic God Is Not Great) – he won a great many centrist and conservative admirers, and lost many longtime friends and allies in progressive circles, as a consequence of his eloquent post-9/11 criticism of Islam, defense of Western values, and support for the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In A Hitch in Time, however, we encounter an earlier Hitchens, one who not only routinely condemns America’s foreign interventions – okay, fine – but is also addicted to making nasty references to such things as “the American empire” and “American nervousness about the multicultural.” (I assume Hitchens meant “multiethnic” here, and not the ideological disaster that is actual multiculturalism – in which case I wonder which countries he considered to be more welcoming than the U.S. of multiple ethnicities.) No strict partisan when it comes to U.S. politics, Hitchens hates JFK and Clinton as much as he does Reagan and Nixon. Writing after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Hitchens suggests – unforgivably – that not a small number of Americans were secret fans of Timothy McVeigh who “made a little holiday in their hearts” over that atrocity, which took 168 lives. Appalling. Two years earlier, not long after Reagan’s policies helped bring about the fall of Communism in Europe, Hitchens dismisses the Gipper as a “sinister cretin” – a smear that led me to reflect that the texts of Reagan’s old radio addresses, written by him alone and collected in Reagan in His Own Hand (2001), make a hell of a lot more sense than most of the pieces in A Hitch in Time. Hitchens also refers mockingly to America’s “Cold War fanaticism,” contending that “even its sternest proponents” didn’t really believe in the Communist threat. That charge also got me thinking about Reagan, who as head of the Screen Actors Guild from 1947 to 1952, bravely waged a very real power struggle with ruthless film-industry Stalinists.

The first piece in Hitchens’s book, originally published in 1983 and inevitably entitled “The Wrong Stuff,” is about Tom Wolfe and is technically a review of Wolfe’s just-issued book The Purple Decades. But Hitchens is more interested in Wolfe’s 1970 piece “Radical Chic,” which unforgettably – and justly – skewered Leonard Bernstein and a bunch of celebrity guests for slobbering all over the Black Panthers at a fundraiser/cocktail party he’d thrown for them on January 14 of that year. For Hitchens, the era captured by “Radical Chic” was the Good Old Days, “when Park Avenue bled for blacks, for Vietnamese, for grape-pickers and draft-evaders and the rest of it” – as opposed to the dark days of 1983, when, with Reagan in the White House, the rich, in Hitchens’s estimation, cared only about themselves. Apropos of Bernstein’s party, Hitchens approvingly quotes an article in which Garry Wills praises “the elite interest in reform.” But of course the Panthers weren’t about “reform”; they preached, and practiced, violent revolution of the kind that would’ve ended up with the likes of Bernstein – and Hitchens and Wills, for that matter – hanging from light posts.

Some of the pieces in this collection are worth reading if only for a single tidbit – a detail, an insight. For example, writing in 1995 about attending the Oscars for the first time, Hitchens notes that his plus-one at that shindig, his ten-year-old son, was treated nicely by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Jessica Lange, Uma Thurman, and Oprah Winfrey – but not by Jane Fonda, who refused to give the lad an autograph. Good on Hitchens for admitting that of all these celebs it was his fellow progressive Hanoi Jane – devoted fan of Ho Chi Minh and self-professed heroine of the downtrodden – who pulled a star turn with his kid. In another piece, pondering at ridiculous length the topic of spanking – that distinctively British fetish – Hitchens recalls a book party at which then Tory leader (but not yet Prime Minister) Margaret Thatcher, peeved about something he’d written, told him to bend over and then thwacked him on the rump with a rolled-up government document.

Speaking of Margaret Thatcher: in a piece about the Ayatollah’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie, Hitchens accuses Thatcher, who by then had moved into 10 Downing Street, of being silent on the Rushdie case, and hence of being something other than the “fearless” Iron Lady of renown. Sheer rubbish. As Charles Moore records in the third volume of his magisterial biography of Thatcher, she instantly recognized the fatwa as a threat to British freedoms and proceeded to stand up firmly for Rushdie’s rights, even though he – a close friend of Hitchens and a champagne socialist of the first order – had never been anything but witheringly contemptuous toward her. Rushdie, notes Moore,

had previously described the British police as “the colonizing army, those regiments of occupation and control.” Now he sought – and received – their full-time protection at taxpayers’ expense. “Rather to the astonishment of everybody, we didn’t hesitate to protect him,” recalled William Waldegrave, then a Foreign Office minister, “against the advice of people like John le Carré and others, who felt he should be left to look after himself.” To keep him safe, the police moved him between fifty-seven different locations in five months….

And it was all done, note well, on Thatcher’s orders. When one official protested against Thatcher’s extraordinary efforts to protect Rushdie, she replied: “Whether or no [sic] we have any sympathy with Rushdie’s views is not the point. We must react strongly to any state murder hunt made against one of our citizens.” Not that Rushdie appreciated it in the slightest. “Early in the crisis,” writes Moore, Thatcher’s foreign policy advisor Charles Powell “reported to Mrs Thatcher that Rushdie had been telephoning the Liberal leader, Paddy Ashdown, to complain, falsely, that she was doing nothing for him.” Only after Thatcher’s death did Rushdie acknowledge her help. She “offered me protection when I needed it,” he confessed, adding that she’d been “very considerate” when they met: “She would tap you on the arm and say: ‘Everything OK?’ I hadn’t expected that touch of tenderness.”

(If I go on at length about this Thatcher business, it’s because I’m rankled by the anti-Thatcher animus that was whipped up by people like Hitchens back in the day and that still endures, long after both Thatcher and Hitchens exited the stage. Just a couple of weeks ago I was at a tram stop in Amsterdam when I overheard a girl of twenty-something tell a friend that she’d hated the movie The Iron Lady, but that it was probably because “I hate Margaret Thatcher.” Dumb brat. I wanted to ask: “What do you hate her for? Saving the British economy or helping to liberate Eastern Europe from Communism?” But I held my fire.)

Hitchens always prided himself on getting the facts straight. But in some of these pieces he gets it wrong. Reviewing a 1992 biography of the humorist P.G. Wodehouse, Hitchens records, apparently without even thinking to question it, the surprising claim that Wodehouse coined the phrase “down to earth.” I recognized this as absurd. Looking further into the matter, I discovered that Wodehouse is believed to have been the first to use this well-established phrase not in its usual sense of “unpretentious” – a meaning it has in common with its equally well-established equivalents in French (terre à terre), Norwegian (jordnær), Swedish (jordnära), and other languages – but rather to mean “back to reality.” The text in question, it turns out, is the novel Very Good, Jeeves! (1930), in which the narrator, Bertie Wooster, tells us: “I had for some little time been living, as it were, in another world. I now came down to earth with a bang.”

Another, rather more consequential misrepresentation occurs in Hitchens’s 1993 review of a life of J. Edgar Hoover. In it, Hitchens dwells at length on the statement by one purported witness, Susan Rosenstiel, that the FBI director, when she met him in 1958 and again the next year, both times at the Plaza Hotel, was in drag. The first time around, according to Rosenstiel, he was “wearing a fluffy back dress,” etc. (the outfit is described in detail, and Hitchens quotes it all); the second time, he was clad in “a red dress” accoutred with “a black feather boa” that made him look like a flapper. Rosenstiel maintained that on these occasions Hoover went by the name Mary, and indeed Hitchens’s review is entitled “Mary, Mary.” This extended silliness led me to dig out my copy of James Kirchick’s excellent 2022 book Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, in which Kirchick dismisses the now universally credited claim that Hoover was a crossdresser, noting that Rosenstiel, “a bootlegger’s ex-wife,” is the only source ever for this outrageous assertion, which virtually everyone on the planet now regards as settled historical fact. Kudos to Kirchick for setting the record (as it were) straight; a posthumous thwack on the rump to Hitchens for being so quick to buy Rostenstiel’s story.

Not that I mean to dismiss this collection out of hand. Far from it. Among the genuinely absorbing pieces here are a mixed 1995 review of the memoir Palimpsest by Gore Vidal, a former friend and mentor on whom Hitchens had already begun to turn; a snappy 1996 piece about Bill Clinton, whom Hitchens recognized from the git-go as a “wide boy” (a neat British term for a wheeler-dealer); a 1997 item on Princess Margaret, “the forerunner of the public, vulgar Windsor style” later perfected by Diana; and a 1999 look back at another Diana, the socialite Diana Mosley, who, born into the famous Mitford family, was wed to the fascist leader Oswald Mosley at the home of Joseph Goebbels (with Adolf Hitler, no less, in attendance). There are also a couple of very long pieces here, one about Prime Minister Harold Wilson and the other about the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, both of which would have been immeasurably better if Hitchens had started them off by providing the reader with some basic facts about his subjects, rather than assuming comprehensive knowledge of their personalities, careers, views, and reputations.

So, yes, the contents of A Hitch in Time are dated. Which makes it all the more impressive just how engaging this book is – by turns enjoyable and, yes, even decades after this stuff was first written, infuriating. For those of us who only began to pay serious attention to Hitchens in the wake of 9/11, when his principled support for America and his outspoken truth–telling about Islam formed a gratifying contrast to the views of most other progressives – not least the editors and regular contributors to the London Review of Books, whose first issue after 9/11, as it happens, was the most poisonous compendium of pure Schadenfreude I’ve ever seen – this record of the pre-9/11 Hitchens provides an illuminating reminder that he wasn’t always the take-no-prisoners orator who, on one unforgettable occasion after another, so boldly and brilliantly assailed the barbaric teachings of the Koran. Although we may not sorely miss the LRB-era Hitchens, the very appearance of a new volume with his name on it causes one to reflect longingly on how much difference he might have made if he’d survived to take part in today’s all-out war on woke.